Microsoft has possibly pulled a fast one on the European Commission (EC) in its wrestling match to see whether their Internet Explorer browser (IE) will be packaged in the new Windows 7 offering. The EC has contended that by including the browser in the operating system that competition is being squeezed out unfairly by Microsoft. Well, we may be seeing that EC stands for ‘Exceptionally Clueless’ considering how they may have stepped all over their own case against the software giant.

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I’m an old-school computer user and when I got my new laptop I decided that rather than overwrite the OS with Linux, I’d actually stick it out and learn Windows Vista. So far, not so bad, but one thing’s bugging me: when I create a file like “test.xls” the system shows it as “test” with an Excel icon. I want to see the filename suffix, though, the “.xls” part. How do I enable that feature / disable that feature in Microsoft Windows Vista??

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Microsoft has announced that more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes from Netflix are now available for viewing using Windows Media Center on PCs with Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate.
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What do tech speculators, bloggers, Microsoft executives, a British Acer representative, and an “accidentally released” memo all have in common? They all concur that Windows 7 could be officially released in October 2009. This is three months earlier than the January release date, predicted mere weeks ago. The new date could be a good omen for Microsoft, where an early release could mean higher sales as consumers jingle their Christmas change in preparation for holiday spending.
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Here’s a BusinessWeek article about how “Microsoft is Fighting Back (Finally)”.  The most interesting part is about Microsoft’s new “Windows Anytime Upgrade” strategy. Here are some details:

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I just upgraded VMware Fusion from 2.0 to 2.0.2 and now when I try to run my Microsoft Windows XP virtual machine, it doesn’t run, it first tells me that I have an old virtual machine and need to upgrade it, then tells me that VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine. What’s wrong and how do I fix it? Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that Windows controls (at least) 90 percent of the PC market, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.  Internet Explorer is steadily losing users, however, and if you’re one of the folks who have switched to Firefox or Chrome, it may interest you to know that there’s a possibility Internet Explorer 8 won’t be inseparable from Windows 7.

A recent test version of Windows 7 (build 7048) is similar to many others insofar as it gives users the opportunity to turn features on and off.  Chris Holmes and Bryant Zadegan noticed that this build lists IE8 among the many other options, though, and they got a screenshot as proof.

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The past couple of weeks I have been learning and testing Amazon EC2 with Windows. I wrote another post about just getting started here. When Amazon announced that Windows would be available I started looking for a project since our current infrastructure and developers are all windows based. Now that I have a project I am actually able to work on this on company time ;).

After setting up a couple of servers, one with IIS and the other with SQL server, I see some issues that I will have to overcome before moving the servers to EC2. I will answer the first one in this post; the others will be in future posts. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out this great list of Microsoft Windows 7 Beta Secrets by Tim Sneath.  Here’s a few of them, so be sure to check out the full list here for the full 30 Windows 7 Secrets!

• Windows Management. By now, you’ve probably seen that Windows 7 does a lot to make window management easier: you can “dock” a window to the left or right half of the screen by simply dragging it to the edge; similarly, you can drag the window to the top of the screen to maximize it, and double-click the window top / bottom border to maximize it vertically with the same horizontal width. What you might not know is that all these actions are also available with keyboard shortcuts:
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Friday was the day that Microsoft makes the first public beta version of Windows 7 universally available to anyone who wants it, via download from Microsoft’s website.

Windows 7 is the next version of the Windows operating system, successor to Windows Vista, due for release later in 2009.

A post yesterday on the Windows Team blog has detailed information on downloading and installing the beta. However, as I write these words, there must be huge interest in the beta as attempts to access that post during the past several hours only produces a ‘server too busy’ message.

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